> Honestly, I am more cynical and just think people are always looking for ways to make their jobs more interesting than they actually are.

When you frame the problem that way, unnecessary complexity seems like part of a healthy solution path. /h

Companies get reliability benefits from slack, but creative people abhor wasted slack. Some basic business strategy/wisdom for maintaining/managing creative slack is needed.

FWIW, at least one other comment seems to correlate job complexity with job security: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43197623

I work in embedded and it's absolutely not "less complex"

For sure. Maybe less accidental complexity. Embedded has been doing asynchronous IO since before it was cool. You also have distributed computing if you’re doing something like sensor networks.